


Silence Is Deafening

by sickly _sweet (infectedsense)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Incest, M/M, Wincest - Freeform, brief mentioned drug use, dubcon, lots and lots of angst, possibly implied underage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 06:33:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2140758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infectedsense/pseuds/sickly%20_sweet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>That’s one of Dean’s problems with America sometimes, is the vastness of it.  You can walk or drive in a straight line for what feels like forever and still never reach the edge of anything.</i>
</p><p>Set during the second half of season 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silence Is Deafening

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2007, originally posted to Livejournal to the Wincest community under my journal name, sickly_sweet. This was my first real SPN fic. Here are my original notes for it:
> 
> "This was supposed to be from the perspectives of both brothers, but it ended up with a lot more Dean. I seem to find him easier to write for (and more interesting). It's something I've been fiddling around with for weeks now to try and make it perfect, but this is as good as I could get it. Constructive criticism is very much welcome!"
> 
> You can still give constructive criticism if you really want to, but I like to think I've actually gotten better at writing over the last 7 years...
> 
> I'm mainly just reposting a lot of things to bulk up my profile on here and so I don't have to keep jumping back to Livejournal to find my old fics, because I abandoned that site five years ago and the archiving/tagging systems suck.

They've never been undressed together for more than ten minutes, and they have never, ever looked each other in the eye either during or afterwards. They never speak. Every few weeks they act out this ritual, playing their parts to perfection; Dean always pushes Sam down by the throat when they fuck, and Sam always struggles.

If they didn't do these things, one or both of them might end up falling apart.

*

Sam hasn't slept properly for three days. There are the times when he's so tired that he doesn't even know he's asleep until Dean says his name and he snaps to his senses in the passenger seat, but that kind of sleep is short, unsatisfying and dreamless. The dreamlessness is the important part. Sam doesn't want to sleep because lately when he does, he doesn’t so much dream as have visions. These prophetic dreams make it impossible for sleep to be anything close to relaxing and refreshing when Sam always wakes from them in a blind panic, adrenaline flooding his system and feeling like he hasn’t slept at all, so it’s not surprising that he’s stopped trying, has instead started keeping himself awake with coffee and energy drinks whenever he can. It means that he’s as twitchy as hell, but he figures that twitchy is a lot better than sick to his stomach and scared to death from the things that he’s been seeing in his nightmares. Things that transcend the word ‘nightmare’ through their undeniable reality.

Ironically though, the less sleep he gets, the more frequent the visions seem to become, until he is almost living in a constant and vivid hallucination.

Sam has stopped telling Dean about them. He's gotten better at hiding the headaches, not letting the blinding pain show in his face except for a tiny flinch, like a tic, when it first kicks in. And Dean has stopped asking him about them. They don’t talk much at all these days. It’s a two-way street, and Sam is sick of always being the one to try and bridge the gap, especially when he is living in fear of another one of those migraines and the gruesome pictures that flood his mind, the acid taste in his mouth and his heart pounding double time in his chest. Maybe he should be able to deal with it, after the things that he’s already seen (Jess’s death included), but it’s one thing watching someone die and another to actually feel the life running out of them as it happens inside your head so that closing your eyes doesn’t shut it out and the screams ricochet off of the insides of your skull. It’s how he imagines a bad acid trip would feel, only worse because he knows that the dead bodies are real, that he’s been too late. Because even though the visions occur before the deaths, nine times out of ten they don’t make it in time. Getting from Connecticut to Texas or from Florida to Pennsylvania by road doesn’t leave much room for error, and mostly it’s a pretty useless effort and they both know it.

They can't save everyone, and Sam can't always see the point in saving anyone. It's gotten so bad that he knows for a fact every time they are saving a life, ten more are being taken across the country. Scores more across the world. So he's gone somewhat numb. He feels it's understandable. In fact, Sam is frankly amazed that he hasn't yet gone insane. But then again, who's to say that he hasn't?

* 

Dean has been unusually quiet since Sam stopped sleeping. Maybe it's because a lot has happened lately that's worth shutting up and thinking about. Maybe it's because Sam isn't as good at hiding the headaches as he thinks he is, or maybe it's because Sam himself has been as good as mute for a week now.

Dean knows that after the first five seconds of any sensation, you pretty much stop feeling it. It's like eating a really fantastic meal. The first bite tastes amazing, but none of the ones that follow can compare. Your body adjusts. He’s always told this to any girl who has complained that he doesn't take his time in the sack. Because come on, if it's not about the physical sensation then it's about the romance, and Dean has never been one to buy into romance.

And romance has never existed in what they are doing, nothing like that could survive in places like this. Even Dean feels like he is dying, but it’s been this way for so long that he’s not sure how to stop. He sure as hell knows how to minimize those feelings of destruction though, and that includes keeping things as brief as possible. He tries to keep his mind out of it.

Sam, he tries to keep his body out of it instead. His mind he lets run, anything to distract himself. Anything as long as he doesn’t feel it.

*

One day Sam realised with a jolt that he had stopped dreaming about Jessica’s death. The visions had completely blacked it out. This realization doesn’t cause him to feel any relief. It makes him feel hollow.

Because it wasn’t that Sam didn’t still have nightmares; he did. If he wasn’t seeing people die then he was still dreaming it, like death was stalking him and he had become more aware of it than of his own life. His mind was drowning in corpses and rivers of blood, and when it wasn’t not the visions, he still had nightmares that were almost the same, only instead of the memories of Jess, he dreamed that Dean was the one to die. Sometimes he was pinned to the ceiling, sometimes he saw the shape-shifter wearing his brother’s skin and taking the bullets, sometimes it was vampires or possession or just plain old psychopathic murderers that took his brother, but Dean always died, and his last word was always ‘Sammy’.

That went on for almost two weeks before Sam gave up on the sleeping altogether.

*

Dean likes to smoke weed because for him, it literally takes him out of his head. When he gets high it’s like he can feel his mind pulling back from his body, and everything real drifts away as his eyes become like windows to look through from a distance. He smokes weed and his world is reduced to thoughts, and his thoughts at those times feel deep and meaningful but really are not, because if they were then he might think about Sam every once in a while, but he never does.

When they’re constantly moving though, it’s hard to get hold of the stuff. Dean has a few contacts that he trusts, but when they could wind up anywhere in the whole goddamn country on any given day, it’s still not enough, and Dean isn’t the type to go trawling the streets looking for a dealer. He can’t afford to do anything that shady, not with their dad’s reputation filtered down into them. Whenever Dean manages to get hold of some weed, he buys as much as he can afford without Sam noticing the missing funds, and he sure as hell makes that shit last.

He’d always assumed that what with the whole college thing, his brother would be no stranger to the reefer, but Dean must have been wrong because Sam never seems to notice when he’s high. It could be because Dean is used to the buzz and he knows how to handle it and act pretty normal through it, but Sam definitely can’t tell. Dean would know if he could, partly because Sam isn’t one to keep his mouth shut when he thinks that he has the moral high ground (self-righteous little fuck, Dean thinks sometimes), but most of all because there are some things that you just know about your family, and Dean can read things like that in his brother. So Sam doesn’t know, and Dean has gotten the smoking down to an art that he practices in hastily snatched minutes while Sam is showering or picking up food or just so absorbed in researching that he doesn’t notice when Dean slips out and comes back smelling of pot.

If Dean had his way, he would rather smoke a whole joint all at once so that he would feel it hit really deep and strong. He would rather get stoned off of his ass so that he’d be able to sit next to Sam in that goddamned car seat without talking and not have the silence drill a hole into his chest. Yeah, he’d rather take it all at once so that he could be completely out of his head, someplace other than where he is for a few hours, because every road looks the same and he can always feel Sam looking at him but when he’s stoned nothing really matters and he can ride things out a lot easier.

But Dean can’t have it his way, and even in the rare times that he has a decent amount of weed he’s too often reduced to sneaking hits outside the motel room with one foot propping the door open and one eye fixed on the bathroom, waiting for Sam to come out so he can stub the joint out against the wall and hide it in his pocket for later. This way Dean is only ever half-buzzed, and maybe this is why Sam hasn’t noticed, because sometimes Dean barely even feels it himself, it’s hardly ever enough to take him away unless the weed he’s managed to get is really strong. He can never smoke enough to make him feel relaxed and comfortable around Sam in those times when everything is off and wrong and awkward, which is when he needs it the most.

Dean can’t even smoke cigarettes (just as a distraction, not an addiction) because he can’t bear to see that disapproving look on Sam’s face, as if he’s the older brother, as if his attempt at a college education makes him a better person. He can’t smoke enough weed to get high but he doesn’t want to give the stuff up either because it’s all that he has that Sam doesn’t know about, that he doesn’t have to share with his brother. Dean doesn’t exactly like it and he isn’t proud of it, but getting high is still an escape for him because it’s still something that isn’t tied in to Sam, and it’s a way for him to feel alone when his whole life is spent with his brother in confined spaces at the mercy of those disapproving looks, and Dean is twenty-seven but he is still controlled by these things and he needs something, just one thing that makes him feel free, even if it’s only for five minutes.

*

Of course Sam cares about the horrible things that he sees. For a month, the longest of his life, he snapped awake almost every night, pushing Dean out of bed and putting the Impala in gear before he'd even fully opened his eyes, desperate to save them. As Dean often says, "You were always the compassionate one, Sam". The way that he says that word, he makes it sound like a disease.

But eventually something has to give, and it gets so that Sam can't take it anymore, the pace or the pressure, and he drops into a sleep so deep that the loudest screams couldn't wake him up, whether from outside of his mind or within. The whole night is filled with them, the visions, of people suffocated and bled to death and tortured and burned. When he wakes up, though, he actually feels better.

Sam learns that, if he lets them, the dreams fade fast. They are no longer nightmares once he doesn't care anymore.

*

These thoughts of theirs shouldn’t ever have crossed over into actions, but in a family like theirs, where they were moving around too much to ever make friends, they were always pushed closer and closer together until one day they crossed that line and that was it.

Having to share a room with your brother is one thing, but a four-year age difference makes it that much harder. By the time Dean was old enough to start jerking off, Sam was still too young to know what it meant, which at first Dean took advantage of since Sam wouldn’t know what the hell he was up to after lights out, but as soon as Sam was old enough to know, things just got really complicated. And once they’d gone too far Dean figured fuck it, already he’d never be able to honestly say that he’d never fucked his own kid brother, and whether you’d done it once or fifteen times, incest was always incest. Dean was sixteen then and cynical enough to know that ‘we only did it once’ wasn’t going to keep his ass from getting kicked, and at that time, with their dad more off the rails than ever, there was so little that he could take comfort in. They’d been forced into closeness their whole lives, and neither of them took responsibility for it when that closeness became deeply unhealthy.

All the same, they never did talk about it. The incidents just happened sometimes, and that was it.

This could have all started because of the loneliness and the isolation and not being able to talk to their dad about sex or anything else, but really, this could have all started because maybe Dean needed something that wouldn’t fall apart in his hands, wouldn’t splinter like wood or shatter like glass or buckle like sheet metal, maybe Dean needed something that he could throw himself against over and over again, and maybe Sam was the first thing that he hadn’t managed to break yet. After practice with bloody noses and dark bruises Sam could take the pain without crying even when he was only ten years old, he could stay as quiet as anything while Dean cleaned up the blood and disinfected the scratches. And maybe in some twisted way this worked, because Sam was the only one who could look all the way inside of Dean without flinching, because all the darkness that he has, well, Sam has it too. And Dean could be raw and open and wounded with Sam, but he could be as strong as steel for him as well, and they both needed it and it wasn’t right but somehow, it could work.

But then Sam did break, Sam ran away to Stanford and Dean has never forgotten that, can’t forget the way that Sam winced and the apology in his eyes outside their apartment, and he might have said that he left to get away from their dad but there are things that Dean knows about his brother, and this is one of them.

*

Dean has been awake for hours the night that Sam whispers “we can’t keep doing this” into the darkness, and the soft sound tears through the years like they were made of paper, which in a lot of ways, Dean figures, they were. He’s sure that Sam knows he is awake, but he has nothing of his own to say. ‘I know’ is never very comforting in times like this.

*

The road is endless, the way that it stretches out in front of the car, and even as they drive at upwards of eighty miles per hour, even as the asphalt is eaten up by the tires, the road ahead is still always endless. That’s one of Dean’s problems with America sometimes, is the vastness of it. You can walk or drive in a straight line for what feels like forever and still never reach the edge of anything. There’s just too much empty space, deserts and wasteland and the roads that cut through it all. That never ending grey-black line hurts Dean’s eyes to look at it, but he’s driving so it’s not like he has a choice. He can’t look away from the roads that lie ahead of them, can’t look away because then they might crash and there would be no more roads after that, not for them. Dean has to watch where the two of them are going even though it all looks the same, they could have been there a thousand times already and he’d never know it, the highway numbers don’t exactly help to differentiate. When he checks the rearview mirror, everything behind them looks the same as well, all the places that they’ve already been.

When they were kids, about thirteen and nine, they were staying in a motel in a state and town that Dean can’t remember the names of, but he remembers this motel. It had a pool out back that they weren’t supposed to go in, but their dad was away a lot of the time so they used to sit by it, Sammy and Dean, dangling their feet into the murky water. Even back then Sam always looked so sad, like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders even though he was supposed to be too young to understand that he did, and Dean couldn’t stand to look at his brother when his eyes were that big and melancholy, staring out over the water in the pool. Wherever they were was hot as hell and Dean used to itch to dive into that pool, just for some respite, even if his dad kicked his ass for it. He used to crave it, and dipping his feet in only made him feel worse, the prickling of his overheated skin that much greater in contrast to the tease of the cold water over his toes.

One day while they were sitting out there, Sam somehow slipped and fell in with a cry. Nowadays Dean would be able to laugh it off, but at that age Sam hadn’t known how to swim. Dean had learned when he was a kid, but by the time Sam was old enough to learn their dad was too far into the whole demon-hunting lifestyle to take the time out for it.

Before he even knew what he was doing Dean had dived right in after his brother, swimming down and grabbing him beneath his arms, hauling him back to the surface. The water wasn’t that cold but it was cold enough and it felt like heaven slipping between his clothes and his skin, washing the sweat away, but Dean couldn’t focus on that because he had to make sure Sam didn’t drown.

When Sam’s head broke the surface he gasped and spluttered, but he was breathing, and Dean got him to the side of the pool where he could hold on safely. It was only then that Dean had realized how hard his heart was pounding in his chest and how much his hands were shaking, because in the rush of his body responding he hadn’t had time to realise just how fucking terrified he had been when he’d heard Sam cry out like that. He took a deep breath and let himself sink down to the bottom of the pool, letting his muscles relax, feeling his heart pounding harder again as the oxygen in his body started to run out.

This time he let his heated skin revel in the coolness of the water, even though it tasted funny and was weirdly cloudy, he let himself enjoy finally being in the pool. But even then he knew that he’d have to come up for air, and getting out of the pool meant getting yelled at by his dad for being irresponsible and almost getting his brother killed, because even aged thirteen Dean had realised that in life it doesn’t matter how free you feel, you always have to come up for air, and there are always things that you can and can’t do, even if you think that you don’t live by the rules, even if your father is a demon hunter you still have to live by somebody’s rules.

Dean knew that soon he would have to come up from the bottom, and he didn’t want to.

*

It’s funny how for the first few months, Dean totally overcompensated. Every new town and every new case meant a new hot girl to hit on, either the chicks they’re helping out or cocktail waitresses or anyone he passes on the street, but for a while Dean can’t go an hour without shooting some lucky female that leering Dean Winchester smile, which, impossibly, has at least a seventy-five percent success rating.

But being on the road pushes them back together, slowly but surely. It’s situational, yes, twenty-four hours a day spent with each other means that they have to get along or they’d end up killing each other, but it’s more than that as well, because after a few months, Dean is hitting on women less and less. And then he isn’t really hitting on them at all.

Sometimes they do it in the backseat of the Impala, sometimes they hide in alleyways, anywhere with shadows. Sometimes it’s the floor of their motel room, but it’s never, ever on the bed. For both of them, screwing in a bed makes it somehow more intimate, more planned for, more real. They avoid them like the plague, and it’s always with the lights off, and Sam always acts like he’s fighting to get away from Dean when really they both know that he’s fighting to get closer.


End file.
